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MASTER THE UNKNOWN
Our workplaces are full of uncertainties. Will you sell enough this month to
make your target? Will you manage to win that big promotion or charm that new
client? What did the CEO mean when he talked about the need to “find
efficiencies”? While it’s no fun to have bad things happen, our brain finds
negative uncertainty as stressful as actual negative outcomes, and we’ll seek to
avoid it if we can.
Take this example, where you have to choose between two options. You can
either be given $30 cash in hand or you can take a gamble where you have an 80
percent chance of winning $45 and a 20 percent chance of winning nothing.
Which would you prefer? The second option is objectively more lucrative, since
it yields an average expected gain of $36. But if you’d feel happier with the first
option, you’re not alone; most people agree with you. It’s a phenomenon known
to behavioral scientists as the
certainty effect
.
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Why do we prefer to avoid situations where we lack information? One reason
is that they make our brain work especially hard, as we’re forced to assess many
possible scenarios—and we know how much our brain’s automatic system likes
to save us mental energy. Not knowing what’s going on also makes us more
sensitive to negative experiences; it seems to enhance the sense of threat. For
example, in a study at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in the UK,
researchers found that people rated an unpleasantly hot panel as being markedly
more painful to touch when they had less idea of the temperature they were
about to experience.
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And yet sometimes we appear to enjoy uncertainty. We devour TV programs
and movies that build suspense and keep us guessing. Research tells us that
babies in every culture enjoy the game of peekaboo, where a person’s face is
revealed in front of them at unpredictable intervals.
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But what’s striking about
the uncertainty we enjoy is that it’s
bounded.
It’s only about specific, defined
elements of the situation. For example, when we read or watch a good thriller,
there’s plenty the writer has made sure we don’t know—but we
do
know that all
will be resolved within a countable number of hours, and we know that nothing
life-changing is going to happen to us as a result of the surprise ending. And, as
it turns out, the same is true for those small babies playing peekaboo. They only
find it fun when there are some things they can rely on—that the person who
hides is the same one who comes back, in roughly the same location. When
someone new appears, or the person pops up in a completely different place,
researchers have found that babies don’t laugh nearly as much.
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That gives us the clue to weathering stressful periods of uncertainty. The more
we place boundaries on the uncertainty—by acknowledging what we know for
certain—the more manageable the remaining ambiguity feels to our brains. That
in turn reduces the state of alert in our brains, allowing us to make wiser
decisions about what we do next.
And however turbulent our situation, there are always
some
things that we can
pin down. In the middle of a crisis, we can highlight the parts of our work that
remain untouched by the upheaval. In the areas that are in disarray, we might
realize we’ve got a good sense of how 80 percent of the situation will turn out.
We can articulate and plan for possible scenarios for the 20 percent, and we
might at least be able to find out
when
the uncertainty will be resolved. Also, we
control our own personal response to the situation: what we choose to say, do, or
feel about it. Research suggests that this approach—focusing on what we control
rather than what’s being imposed on us—can even help people be more resilient
when dealing with highly stressful and chaotic situations like military combat
and natural disasters.
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That was borne out by the experience of Jacquie, a college PR officer, who
had to cope with a deadly earthquake that struck her New Zealand town in 2011.
Jacquie was the media contact for the college, and journalists from around the
world descended upon her while she and her colleagues were coping with chaos.
Her team was trying to figure out what to do without power and water, while not
knowing when the next aftershock was coming or even how their loved ones had
fared.
Amid all that, Jacquie found it helpful to focus her attention on a few familiar
and controllable things. First of all, she looked for connections to things she
knew. For example, she quickly came to see that “making progress was still all
about relationships—helping others cope under pressure, building trust with the
media, giving people some optimism where possible, and being kind to one
another.” These were things she knew she was good at, even if the context was
entirely unfamiliar. She also decided to see it as “the most profound professional
development opportunity I’d ever have. I thought, ‘If I can handle this, I can
handle any crisis.’
”
Focusing on those two small islands of certainty—her skills and her attitude—
boosted Jacquie’s resourcefulness and resilience through the difficult days and
months that followed. With many buildings damaged, the college held a
celebration for its graduating seniors in huge tents on campus, and Jacquie
ensured that this precious “good news story” received national media coverage.
It was seen as a remarkable triumph for the whole community. And at the end of
it all, Jacquie and her colleagues won a much-deserved industry award for their
post-earthquake work.
Try this approach for yourself when you’re dealing with an uncertain
situation, by asking these clarity-restoring questions:
“Setting aside the things I don’t know, what are the things I
do
know?”
“What is there that’s familiar to me, given my past experience?”
“What is mine to shape or control in this situation?” (For example: “What
attitude do I want to have about this?” “What do I choose to learn from
this?”)
“What are some possible future scenarios?” (Include the best case, the worst
case, and some variation on the extremes.) “What would I do in each of those
scenarios?”
“What are some ‘no regrets’ actions that I know I can take?”
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